Sunday, April 12, 2009

Carbunkle 2 - Ren's Romantic Dream

Somewhere in between the storyboard poses and the animation we do layout poses as I showed in the Dave Feiss post. There are usually more layout poses than storyboard poses, because I get in there and fiddle with them.

In this case, Kelly Armstrong worked from the basic layout poses but added a lot of her own - without straying from the context of the scene at all. All her poses only strengthened the scene and made it more individual and more real.Here's the basic layout pose above which only tells you that Ren is having a romantic dream and that he thinks Stimpy is a beautiful human woman.

Kelly, again listened really closely to the soundtrack and drew expressions to match every inflection in my voice. She also exaggerated far beyond what anyone was used to seeing at the time. Even me.
These are pretty close to the layouts.
Kelly added the lips and all the specific mouths.
Holy Cow! Any other studio would fire you for drawings like this!
Back to layouts.

Unfortunately this beautiful scene got cut when the cartoon first aired. It was deemed too "homosexual". Even though I think there were gay people working on both sides of the production.

It actually isn't remotely homosexual. If anything it's "homophobic". Once Ren wakes up and realizes he's kissing Stimpy and not a girl, he freaks out. It's also species-o-phobic, when you think about it.

If you wanna still frame through -it, you'll see a lot of amazingly crazy Kelly drawings.
I want to point out again that they aren't randomly crazy; not merely for their own sake. They all drive the point of the scene home, right down to its minutest details. This is entirely different than say a Jim Tyer, who can sometimes just be crazy for crazy sake, without regard to character or to what the scene is about. That's still more entertaining than blandness, but it's much harder to be creative and stay within context.

26 comments:

Did this post actually get put up on Friday or late Thursday? I didn't see it show up in the RSS feed until Friday morning, tho it has a Wednesday date and shows up in order as if it were put up before two posts I have read.

Sorry for the confusion folks,I made a whole pile of clips all at once.

I usually like to spread a topic out (like the making of Big House Blues), but it takes so much time to make the clips that I haven't had time to come up with other subjects and collect the art to illustrate them with.

Help me out Ted!

Litlgrey: that's the next post. It was animated by Bob, so I split the scenes apart for discussion.

The main purpose is to stage the scene. To place the characters within the background at the size you want them to appear on the screen. I have posts about it. Click the "layout" tag at the bottom of the post.

I added a purpose (for TV) of doing extra poses to give me more control of the acting and final look of the scenes, knowing that the animation would be done somewhere else, not within my direct observation.

It's a cross breed of the classic animation system and the sad realities of TV production.

This is still my favorite Ren and Stimpy because when you freeze frame it, you see the craziest drawings. It's Ren and Stimpy in it's rawest form. I guess I'm sort of a purest that way. There's never been an episode that looked like this one.

Stimpy is like a loose bag of sand in this scene. The way his body flops is just brilliant.

I'm really glad you're covering this cartoon! I love everything about Big House Blues, and I've been hoping you would put up some posts about it ever since you first started your blog. I'm really enjoying them!

I'm limited to what I have, more or less. And I don't have anything applicable to this particular post. Sorry.

If you're asking for more BHB stuff in general tho, if you go tohttp://tag.rubberslug.com/gallery/inv_info.asp?ItemID=129983I collected some related images to the BHB pigeon drawing there (look under sketch 1, sketch 2 for the screencap), if you want to compare some identical steps for a specific image in BHB. Most of the drawings under "sketch 1" came from the Animation Archive auctions from (a year and a half?) ago. I would assume Steve has all of the images from those auctions, tho I can't recall if they were all from BHB or not.There's also a series of drawings of Ren leaving the pound athttp://tag.rubberslug.com/gallery/master_query.asp?SeriesID=14467&Page=3And there's a few cels from BHB, but they don't provide much information that screencaps don't (tho the praying Ren looks mighty smooth).

I could wait for another BHB post, but I gotta ask before I miss my chance....

Something I've been wondering about for awhile, John - On the A-HAA blog, ages and ages ago, Steve put up the storyboards of this, as you know. And as I recall there was some reference to a "3-D Montage". What was the proposed nature of this montage? I'm fascinated by the possibility that this could have been a multimedia cartoon at one point - BHB already has so many diverse visual elements, yet it's so distinctive overall that it doesn't even look quite like other R&S episodes. So when I imagine CGI ( or something to the same effect) making an appearance, my head feels like it's gonna explode!

What was that scene planned to be about and what was it supposed to look like?

Little things like Stimpy's leg twitching while Ren strokes his nose and his nose bouncing up and down while Ren kisses him are barely noticed when watching the scene in realtime but the overall impression makes an already funny scene even better. It looks similar to what Clampett cartoons did in that you don't notice all the single frame details but still feel the overall emotion of a scene.